As if bottling aesthetics wasn’t daunting enough, Joseph Quartana and Kaya Sorhaindo have transformed the childhood memories of six up and coming designers into their third series of collaborative perfumes, Six Scents. Pairing Alexis Mabille, Mary Katrantzou, Junn.J, Rad Hourani, N.Hoolywood, and Ohne Titel with the Swiss perfumers of Givaudan, Series Three launches with several worldwide parties, last week in New York and this week in Paris. “I choose from what I believe to be the major fashion markets in terms of what’s exciting out there and I try to maintain a geographic balance,” says Quartana. “All the designers we choose are at the brink of being a hugely successful house but they are still all too small to have their own scent.”
Olfactory dead ringers for each designer, the scents range from the saccharine sweet to deep musk. “The most important [factor is] that the designer displays a strong, continuous vision for a few seasons,” says Quartana. Meant to symbolize the circle of life, Ascent by Rad Hourani and perfumer Christophe Raynaud mixes the unlikely essences of baby powder, sperm and leather jackets. Inspired by the art of visual trickery, Trompe L’Oeil by Mary Katrantzou and perfumer Shymala Maisondieu blends feminine florals, oriental notes with the designer’s signature quirk.
With a portion of the proceeds being donated to War Child International, each limited edition fragrance includes an exclusive Robert Knoke portrait and a DVD of commissioned short films from Alia Raza (story edited by Tavi Gevinson and starring Julia Restoin-Roitfeld), Rainer Judd, Olaf Breuning, Sue De Beer, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Heather Sommerfeld, Tim Richardson, Lucas Michael and James Widegren. “In addition to creating unique fragrances by celebrating perfumers and pairing them with visionary designers, we aim to expand cultural discourse through collaborating with artists,” says Sorhaindo. “We asked each artist/filmmaker to recall their memory of youth with the hopes that victims of war will rise beyond the trauma that might otherwise hold them back. These films help to not only capture the overall experience of the collection and present a new way of engaging or interpreting the fragrances, but to help us to appreciate some of the experiences that we’ve had, no matter how awkward or dark they may be.”
That’s all well and good but what we really want to know is what V Magazine smells like… “A scent of preservation – progressive, thoughtful and a homage to the past – something that exists between the purity of invention and contamination of compromise.” We hope that includes Neroli.
Six Scents: Series Three, $149 each. Available in the US at Opening Ceremony, The Standard and Lucky Scent.
Source - VMAGAZINE.COM